


Five Nightmares Tony Suffers and One Dream Tony Lives

by Winterstar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Disturbing Themes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterstar/pseuds/Winterstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's on the tin - at least in a dream kind of way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Nightmares Tony Suffers and One Dream Tony Lives

1.

The first thing he hears upon seemingly gaining consciousness in the middle of a bleak white cell sears through his brain like a branding iron. His brain jerks and skips like a sputtering car battery coming back to life after a jump. He’s up on his feet before he realizes it, and spins around to get a clear idea of who is making that god awful noise. 

The agony ripping through the screams makes him cringe, and Tony yells out to any of his jailers to find out what the fuck is going on. 

“Hey, morons!” 

The only answer is the pitiful cry and when Tony calls out again, the pain filled cry turns into someone begging, please, over and again. It is only then that Tony recognizes the voice.

“Steve? Jesus Christ, Steve? Shit? Steve?” Tony races up to the wall and pounds on it. He thinks he can hear the pathetic whimpers coming from the other side of the wall. He pounds on the wall, his fist bashing against the hard surface. “Steve? What the hell are they doing? Steve!”

His words don’t stop the sound; in fact, it intensifies and it grows into a screech. But it isn’t the pleas for mercy that hit Tony solidly like a wrecking ball in the chest, but it is the sound of electricity before each and every shriek. The hiss, pop, and crackle accentuate the hitch of breath and the ache of words that follow it. 

Tony hits the wall again with an open palm as the electricity fills the air and he smells ozone and flesh flaying, burning. He screams to Steve. “Steve! I’m coming. Shit, I’m coming.”

He turns on his heel and looks around the room. He realizes there is no door. The white cell consists of four white walls and a high white ceiling. The floor is exactly the same as the walls. He looks down at himself and notes no suit, no armor, just his jeans and his black t-shirt, the arc reactor shining through it. His feet are bare. He has nothing and he’s trapped in an oubliette. 

The sounds from the other room, through the wall, mercifully fall silent. He imagines Steve panting against the pain, the burns of the electrical torture. What the hell? Where are they and why? What happened?

He can’t remember anything. How the hell did he get here?

He rifles through his pockets and they are empty. The only advanced equipment he has is the arc reactor itself, but with no means to use it, nothing to plug it into, he’s impotent, – and Tony Stark does not like to admit he’s impotent to anybody. 

He walks back to the wall again and says, “Steve? Can you hear me? Steve?”

When he touches the wall, a spark streaks out and stabs him in the center of the chest, right where the reactor is. The force causes him to fly across the room and he slams into the opposite wall only to slide down it, dazed and blinking. He’s not sure what happens next, it may be his eyes close for longer than a second or two but when he opens them again, there’s a crumpled form in the middle of the room. 

He squints and focuses on the tattered remains of a blue uniform, shredded and blood streaked. Blue, mainly blue, with some white and red. He’s certain the red is the color of the uniform and not just the blood staining parts of it. Crawling on all fours to the body, he reaches out and flips the inert figure over.

Steve’s eyes are closed; his face a bruise, his chest riddled with burns over burns that even the serum would have a hard time healing. He reaches out to touch the swollen cheek and gasps as Steve opens his eyelids.

He has no eyes.

“Oh Jesus, oh fuck,” Tony says and the world blacks out.

“Sir, it is three thirty two in the morning.”

The voice is calm, like a docent at a museum explaining some obscure work of art. He opens his eyes to his surroundings to find he is in his bedroom in the Tower. It is three thirty two in the morning, and Steve is snoring next to him. He pats down his shirt to find the arc reactor is gone, long gone. It has been over a year since it was removed. 

He touches Steve’s shoulder to a light groan and then a shift of muscle. “Tony?”

Steve rolls over and snuggles up against Tony’s side.

“Hey?” Tony says.

“Hmm?” Steve replies without opening his eyes.

“Open your eyes for a minute.”

“Tony, what time is it?” Steve moans a little and peels his eyes open, those beautiful blue eyes. “What do you want? I’m tired. Have to get up early for the flight.”

Tony leans down and kisses his forehead. “Sorry, go to sleep, go back to sleep.”

“’Kay,” he says and drifts away to slumber with a smile on his face.

Tony hates nightmares. Truly and absolutely hates nightmares.

2.  
The snow touches everything, decorates it with lace and frost and ice, until the whole world becomes a frigid and cold place. It reminds him of the stories his mother used to read him, the one of Narnia, forever cursed to live in winter because of the witch. He surveys the impossibly tall pine trees, the beautiful snow flickering down from a sky he cannot see beyond the treetops. There’s light from some source he cannot identify, but it is soft and yielding. It barely expands beyond the hollow of the trees. He realizes it comes from his chest and the arc reactor. 

Fingering it, Tony steps along the snow – his bare feet cold but not frozen. He’s not sure how he got here or what it means. He’s sure he’s trapped though because when he scans the fallen snow, there are no foot steps into the grove of trees. It is as if someone dropped him in the middle of the trees from the heavens above. 

There’s no one here. There’s no sound, just the whisper of snow as it falls further about him. He should be shivering in the dark and cold, since he’s only in a black t-shirt and jeans without any shoes and socks. But it is as if he’s only just arrived. 

“The cold is beautiful, isn’t it?”

He whips around to see Steve standing next to one of the large pine trees. He’s dressed in his Captain America uniform from when he went out on raids with the Howling Commandoes. He looks like he should be warm, but his hair is frosted, like ice, about his head. It looks like a crown of glass. He’s not wearing any gloves and his fingers are blue as is his face.

“Steve?”

“Sometimes I miss it.”

“Miss it?” He’s not sure where he is; only that he knows he’s not supposed to be here. He thinks Steve might be in danger, but he can’t be sure. He remembers something about being trapped, but he thinks that was a long time ago, in a cave where it was dark and dirty, and people threatened him – Steve wasn’t there then.

Steve walks out onto the snow and it crunches hard beneath his thick boots. “Yeah, I miss it.”

“Miss what?”

Steve doesn’t seem to hear, he only looks up into the canopy of endless pine trees and says, “Bucky fell into the ravine in the winter. Did you know that?”

“I-I think I did-.” But he isn’t sure and he doesn’t understand what Steve is doing in the middle of the forest or, for that matter, what the hell he’s doing either. “We should get out of here.”

“I’m not going.”

“You’re not?”

“There’s nowhere for me to go, plus I think I want to feel it again.”

“Feel what?” What the fuck is he talking about? What the hell is going on here? “It’s freaking freezing out.” Tony can feel the sensation of cold, see the wisps of fog from his mouth as he speaks, but still the cold is held off, at bay from him. He can see Steve suffers from it though. He’s cold as if he’s been standing in the forest for days.

“I miss the cold.”

“That doesn’t make sense, you don’t like the cold.”

“Soon it will come again.” Steve gazes at Tony and his eyes are clear and sightless. They look like glass marbles. “I can’t wait to be frozen again.”

Tony jars awake and looks around the workshop. Bruce is in the corner working on something, he has his glasses hanging from his fingertips as he bends forward to stare at the computer screen. Bruce turns and glances at him for a second but then goes back to work. 

Shrugging awake, Tony pushes away from the lab bench, feels his face and the impression of a wrench on his cheek. “You could have woken me up.”

“What? And ruin all the talking in your sleep.”

“I was talking in my sleep?”

“You always do.”

“Do I?” That is not right. He frowns at Bruce and thinks maybe he’s still dreaming, or nightmaring or whatever the hell it is called. “I do not.”

Bruce chuckles a little and shakes his head. “No, no you don’t.”

“Stop trying to be cute, that’s not cute.”

It’s too late for a reprimand; Bruce has already turned back to his work and is consumed by it. Tony is left to wonder at his nightmare and its meaning. Maybe it was the Mexican food Steve and Tony had for dinner. He puts it down to that and ignores the fact his toes are cold.

3.  
The bed is not comfortable. In fact, the bed feels like it is made of ropes strung across a loom. It knots in his back and he moves a little to try and find a comfortable spot. There isn’t one. It doesn’t matter; the person lying next to him, across the aisle in the next cot over, is staring up into the dark of the barracks. 

It occurs to him that he should not be in an army barracks. That he never joined the army and that he’s Tony Stark, billionaire and the cot he’s sleeping on reminds him of Afghanistan. He wonders if he’s having a flashback. 

He knows it isn’t a flashback when the person next to him speaks.

“I’m a little worried.”

“Worried?” Tony says and frowns. 

“Concerned, I should say concerned.” A too thin arm reaches up and the forearm falls over his eyes. “I should have more faith, Ma always said I needed to believe in things, in people.”

“Oh,” Tony says, because he has no idea what the appropriate response should be. He considers if he should sit up and examine his surroundings. There’s little light since his arc reactor seems to be the only source of light in the area. How did he get here? Where is here exactly? 

“But it’s a chance, you know? I have to believe.”

This is ridiculous; Tony feels like someone dropped him into a middle of a movie with no particular explanation of the plot or anything. “Hmm, I’m sorry but I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Oh.” The sound of the voice is small, hurt, almost like a broken winged bird being stepped on. And why the hell did he just think of that image? Nonetheless, he feels like he should apologize. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to say, really.” He throws his arm down along his side. “I thought Doctor Erskine asked you to stay here with me until the morning.”

“The morning?”

“The project? You know about Rebirth, right?” He screws up his face as he says it and Tony knows he feels a kind of fear and regret – that he shouldn’t have actually confessed the name of the project.

As the words hit him the world around him redefines into a kind of shuttered reality where he understands where he is, why he is but not how he is. He peers over at Steve, so thin and rail like and he says, “Yeah, yeah I know all about Rebirth.”

“Do you work with them, the doctor and his team?” Steve isn’t looking at Tony but into the deep recesses of the shadows and the dark coming of night.

“I know Howard Stark,” Tony says because he doesn’t want to lie, not now, not here.

“Geez, that’s something. Stark, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony says but leaves it at that. “You ready for the big day?”

He sees a slight hitch of shoulder as Steve continues to stare into infinity about him. “I think.”

“But you’re a little worried?”

“Concerned, I think I changed that to concerned.” 

“You did,” Tony says. “What are you concerned about?”

“Nothing, everything,” Steve says and leaves it at that. 

It is in that moment that Tony understands the real bravery and courage of Steve Rogers pre-serum. Had it been desperation and need that drove him to allowing an untested formulation to be injected into his body or had it been something more – something like belief and hope and courage? 

He sits up and swings his legs over the side of the cot. Folding his hands, he says, “You gotta believe, Steve. This was meant to be.”

Steve turns to look at him and in that look he sees something that is absent in his Steve’s eyes, that has been dimmed with experience and understanding. He sees fear. He understands for the first time how hard it must have been for Steve to go through with it, to allow his body and his life to be sacrificed for the greater cause.

And just that thought, the thought of Steve sacrificing himself shoots a jolt of cold terror in Tony’s heart that he wakes up to see Steve – his Steve – sitting with his back against the headboard and a sketch pad on his lap. 

He turns to look at Tony. “What?”

“It was hard, wasn’t it?”

“What Tony?” Steve sets the drawing pad aside and places his charcoal pencil on top of the side table. 

“Rebirth,” Tony says and he can still feel the sliver of fear eating its way like a worm through his gut.

Steve smiles and shakes his head. “What brought this on?” Tony reaches up and Steve settles into his arms. “What, baby, what?”

“Just stay here.”

Tony doesn’t know if it is a dream or a nightmare but sometimes there isn’t a difference.

4.  
There are snakes under water. Snakes that do not live but still capture and hold him under the surface so that he cannot breath, so that he can see the break of water over him but cannot attain the air, the land, the surface of the world. 

He stays wrapped and coiled in the underwater world, not breathing, dying, and drowning. The whole of his life has dropped out of the sky around him into the netherworld. He’s trapped here with the snakes and the creatures of the dark places, the hollowed out abyss. Here is where Tony Stark ends; here is where there is no Tony Stark. He knows, feels, understands insignificance as he lies entombed under the sea. 

He once thought of himself as invincible, larger than life itself, but a cold cave in Afghanistan showed him his folly and he became something more. But now he is less, so much less than the world and his persona. He is scum at the bottom of the ocean with no one to mourn him. 

The crush of his life comes down upon him like an avalanche of greed, and sass, and helplessness. He’s learned so much, yet so little in his time. He wants to live more, he wants to prove he can be more, but he’s ensnared in the sea by the snakes of his own transgressions. It is JARVIS who saves him. 

His own creation becomes his deliverance. As he shoots skyward, he glimpses another soul, a body adrift in the water. He halts – this wasn’t how it was – this isn’t his memory but something worse, something horrible.

It is Steve, dead in the water. His face is submerged, his body lax in the waves. 

Tony knows it isn’t real, it can’t be real. It would be months later that Tony and Pepper would break up, it would be longer after that the Steve and Tony would go on their first tentative date. He’s not even sure it was a date. It was something between a dare and a date. It had been Hawkeye who’d been harping on them to do it already, that neither of them were man enough to actually admit their attraction. 

They’d both joked and verbally sparred with each other during that maybe date. It was like being under the spell of Loki’s glow stick of destiny all over again, only it was faintly erotic and always audacious as they sat through a baseball game. In the time since, he learned a lot about Steve, one of which was that Steve was hardly naïve even if he wasn’t as experienced sexually as Tony.

In the underwater world Steve is dead and Tony never dated him, never touched him, never caressed him, never taught him some of the tricks of the trade. In this horrible scenario, Steve dies and Tony is alone without the love of his life. He carries the limp body of Steve from the sea. When he flies to the nearest shore and settles upon it, Steve falls lifeless to the rocks, his mouth slack and open.

His eyes roll open only to reveal snakes as they twist their way down his face and across the muddy sands. 

Tony lurches away and stumbles backward only to look around and see that he’s in the middle of a Stark Industries board meeting and everyone around the table is silent and looking at him. Pepper is at the front of the room, giving a presentation and frowning at him. He only rubs his temples and casually waves her to continue.

He slips on a pair of sunglasses and wonders how drug addled brains can follow anyone from their youth to middle aged. 

5.  
The sky is broad and open and boundless. It sparks in the dark and shines with wonders he can never really know or understand. He still recalls the hell of the void, dropping and falling from the wormhole, but at the same time seeing how beautiful it all really was.

When he turns around, he sees he is surrounded by the universe. He can see the crab nebula, the glistening hub of the galaxy, the planets and the faraway stars burning bright and brilliant in the darkened space.

“Where?” He doesn’t realize he says it out loud until the person, Steve, standing next to him answers.

“The tesseract.”

“What?” Tony says and doesn’t understand. How can he? He hasn’t been in charge of these visions. He’s only been a passenger. 

“You wanted to know where we are,” Steve says and smiles. His face is serene, quieter than Tony has ever seen him and he worries for a moment if Steve is accepting a fate that he shouldn’t – a fate that might lead to death.

“Yes.”

“It’s the tesseract,” Steve says. “I saw it when the tesseract had been activated in the Red Skull’s ship. We’re there now.”

“How?”

Steve shrugs. “Maybe I never left.”

Again, this is wrong. Tony hates dreams that screw up reality. It just pisses him off. He wants this crap to stop now, but somehow has no control over his damned dream, which pisses him off royally. And, yes, there is a huge differences between just pissed off and royally pissed off.

This is all a game, the nightmares, the visions. He’s not sure but none of it is real, or, at least, none of it is his conjuring. It feels wrong, off like he’s looking through someone else’s eyes, like he’s hijacking someone else’s brain. 

“This is where I am now,” Steve is saying and he’s strolling through the stars leaving a wake of glitter along this trail. “This is my reality.”

Tony has no idea what is going on. He’s fairly certain he didn’t take any mind altering drugs of late and he’s pretty sure he’s not drunk. This is not the way drunk goes for him. He frowns and thinks on all the nightmares – how they are all clumped together in a heap like dirty laundry. 

There’s not much memory of what happened in between – there’s not much memory of being awake. This puzzles him, because he’s not sure if anyone can remember real memories while trapped in a dream. Does it work that way? Why is this so fucking hard? Where the hell is Bruce when you need him?

“Not here,” Steve says and keeps traipsing forward mowing away at the stars and the galaxies as they spiral and swirl around his hips, his flank.

“Did you just answer my question?”

Steve doesn’t turn around but says, “Shouldn’t I have? I can never remember what I am supposed to be doing.”

God, he feels sick and tired and kind of stressed out. What the hell happened, maybe he should ask JARVIS. 

Tony glances upward toward the heavens and there is no need. The entirety of the heavens, the cosmos is about him, surrounding him, encompassing him. As he looks at Steve, he glimpses the stars through his chest, in his eyes. Steve becomes part of the transparency of being, the elusiveness of existence. 

“Christ, Bruce should be having this fucking dream, not me. I think maybe this is a mushroom induced dream or something.”

“Or something,” Steve echoes and turns to Tony. “If you don’t wake up, then what does it matter?”

“I like riddles even less than I like nightmares and mag-.” It hits Tony. “Shit, shit, shit.”

He tries to remember any instance, anything of any substance between the dreams, between the nightmares. Nothing, the only thing he’s experienced is the dreams themselves. It doesn’t matter if he can or cannot remember what he does know is that this is magic.

He rushes to Steve’s side but when he reaches out to grab him, his hands feel only air. Steve tilts his head and smiles. 

“What are we but dust in the wind.”

“Crap now you’re quoting Kansas? Now, I know this is magic,” Tony says and then turns. He yells, “No more mindfuckery, I got your number.”

With his pronouncement, the figment of Steve seems to solidify and tumbles forward, a blood stain on his chest, his hands dripping. “Tony?”

“I said no more mindfuckery,” Tony says to the heavens as they beat a bleeding red river around him, as Steve becomes part of the rain of crimson. He screams out and nothing and everything melds together until he’s left in the dregs of it, as he ends up dragged and dry at the end of darkness with no light to start again.

+1  
Sounds always come first. This is what he learned a long time ago. When he’s rising from an unconscious state, he hears and experiences and thinks and calculates but he cannot sense anything but sound first.

It is odd, but he never questions it. Why doesn’t smell come back first – or maybe it does – he just doesn’t really remember that. Sensory perception is just an undependable thing. Maybe it is pain that comes first, or maybe not. But sound, sound is strong and true and pushes through all of the haze until everything comes into sharp defining octaves and pitches and it hurts but doesn’t because it means you are alive and well and maybe a little bit better than you were before.

What he hates is when the sound trickles into his dreams and leaves him panting and frightened and looking for escape. This is not one of those times, this time he surfaces and bursts forth and fights for consciousness. This time he opens his eyes, fatigued by the fight for consciousness but at the same time satisfied he’s finally made it.

He peers about in the fog. Voices – there are always voices – speaking and asking. He knows he’s answering the questions, he’s been doing so for the last hour or more. He has no real idea of the time, only that it is and that it has been too long since he’s seen a face he knows. 

He sees the face and the hollows of his eyes – eyes which plead with him, ask him not to leave. He wants to show some strength, that he will not leave, but he’s drifting and he does leave again, but comes back easily this time to find that same face waiting, tired, frustrated, and wrung out.

“You look horrible.”

Steve smiles at Tony. “I could say the same to you.”

He licks dry lips and Steve offers him ice chips. They are cool and crunch – more sound- there is always sound. “What happened?”

“You don’t want to know,” Steve says and has his hand placed over Tony’s. “Everyone’s okay, though. Now, everyone’s okay.”

He looks at Steve, he can’t really focus, he knows he won’t remember all of this when he wakes up again. He might see flashes, images, but he won’t see this – he’ll only hear it. 

“Bad?” Something horrible happened, something terrible to make Steve look as fragmented as he does.

Steve takes in a deep breath, holds it, and lets it out loudly before he answers. “Yeah, very. We were worried. I was worried.” His eyes are more than weary, they are drained and desolate.

“Okay now, right?”

Steve breaks, then. He puts his head down on the gurney with his forehead on Tony’s chest. “Now, yes, yes, yes.”

Tony picks up his hand; it has a pulse-ox meter on it with intravenous lines snaking up to hooks and bags. He cups Steve’s head and whispers, “I’m okay.”

“Don’t do that again, okay?”

He doesn’t remember what he’s not to do, but he promises nonetheless. He doesn’t like to see Steve Rogers, Captain America, in pieces. “Okay, I promise.”

Steve grapples for Tony’s hand and brings it to his lips. He blesses it with a kiss and says, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“You were gone for too long,” Steve says. “I kept asking you to come back to me, to see me.”

“I’m back, I saw you, Steve,” Tony says and even as he states it, he knows he’s feeling stronger still. He recalls snapshots of what may have happened, what did happened. It was ugly and deadly and Steve had been in the line of fire – until Tony made sure he was not. “I saw you, Steve.”

Steve doesn’t respond, probably because he doesn’t understand the significance of what Tony stated. In all of his nightmares, through his time unconscious he saw Steve. He looked for Steve, he tried to help Steve, he wanted to protect Steve – he wonders at this but then again sometimes it is best left untouched, unsolved. There are no nightmares, Tony realizes, when he holds such wonder at his side.

Steve leans forward and lightly brushes his lips across Tony’s – there is a resistance, soft and sweet, enticing and wistful. It is love, it is promise, it is hope.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this right after I left the hospital following major surgery. Kind of loopy - I wanted to capture what it feels like in that drift between being in surgery and recovering. Hope this worked out for you.
> 
> Thanks for reading and DFTBA.


End file.
